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What is Radical Mental Health? | Mindful Occupation

worth read and coinsidering the mainstream system is failing you in any way.

Radical mental health is about grass roots and diversity. For so long, our psychic differences have been defined by authority figures intent on fitting us into narrow versions of “normality.” Radical mental health is a dynamic, creative term; one which empowers us to come up with our own understandings for how our psyches, souls, and hearts experience the world, rather than pour them into conventional medical frameworks. For example, the Icarus Project understands people’s capacities for altered states as, “dangerous gifts” to be cultivated and taken care of, rather than a disease or disorder to be cured or eliminated. Indeed, by joining together as a community, they believe that, “the intertwined threads of madness and creativity can inspire hope and transformation in a repressed and damaged world.” It follows that any realistic approach to well-being has to begin by accepting and valuing diversity. There is no single model for a “healthy mind,” no matter how many years of drug treatment, schooling, or behavior modification programs we’ve been put through. And without differences, there can be no movement.

this is somethign that is very important to me:

Radical mental health is about interconnectedness. While mainstream conceptions of mental health and illness reduce people’s experiences into brain chemicals or personal histories, radical mental health sees human experience as a holistic convergence of social, emotional, cultural, physical, spiritual, historical, and environmental elements. This interconnectedness also spirals outwards with the idea that we all share this planet together—humans, animals, insects, and plants— what happens in one world affects all other worlds. We don’t have to see ourselves as separate beings, but rather in terms of relationships: a part of myself “overlaps” with a part of you; if you’re hurt I can be hurt too. No matter how alienated we are by the world around us, no matter how out of step, depressed, and disconnected we might feel, We Are Not Alone.

I cannot stand the simplistic reductionalism and "me first" mentality imposed by the mainstream MH community. I need to function within a large system, albeit the whole community around me might be dysfuntional on many levels (not from psychatric point of view... but because of cultural, historical experience we carry).

Radical mental health is about challenging the dominance of biopsychiatry. The biomedical model of psychiatry, or “biopsychiatry,” rests on the belief that mental health issues are the result of chemical imbalances in the brain. It is an idea that is wrapped up in the same ideology of the marketplace that has cut our social safety nets and fragmented our communities—that is, that the problems and solutions ofour lives are located solely in the individual. More and more, the belief that our dis/ease is in our brains has desensitized us to the idea that our feelings and experiences often have their roots in social and political issues.

Another part that is important, at least to me. I might be crazy, but that does not do away with the fact that there are problems in the world. And I need to handle those and myself at the same time. Not wrap myself in a bubble of therapeutic approaches and mind altering substances to make me not feel it so much anymore.



I think this model has a lot to offer. Especially to those who don't really fit in the current society for many reasons. For people who are alternative in one or more ways.

This belief is not new. In 1890, Christian von Ehrenfeis blended philosophy and psychology to create a paradigm of psychology called Gestalt psychology.

I love the Gestalt approach.